Review/Theater: Stitches; Of Stardom and a Tyranny of Images

In "Stitches," the corrosively funny, if overextended, comedy by the brother-and-sister team of David and Amy Sedaris at La Mama E.T.C., irony doesn't take the form of a wink but of a steady, wide-eyed gaze that flattens everything to the absurd dimensions of a macabre animated cartoon.

The story of a pretty, popular high-school girl who becomes a television star after her face is mutilated by the propeller of a power boat, "Stitches" portrays an America in which life is a series of media-conditioned reflexes. Actually, the play itself feels like the product of minds shaped by an unceasing stream of disjunctive images -- from old movie melodramas, perky sitcoms, hypnotic commercials and gritty tabloid news shows -- given bizarrely equal weight by the small screen that disseminates them.

This self-referential, low-camp sensibility, with its mixture of gross-out jokes, stoned humor and parodic pastiche, has been around at least as long as "Saturday Night Live." And the basic premise of "Stitches" -- the dictatorial, idol-making power of television -- is hardly fresh. (Remember "Network"?)

All the same, David Sedaris, who has developed a cult following as a droll commentator on National Public Radio, and his sister, who appears memorably in "Stitches" and has performed with the Second City comedy troupe in Chicago (as have two of her fellow cast members), are gifted satirists with their own, very particular voice.

Their dialogue bristles with mordant wit and off-center details that propel potentially obvious jokes into their own absurdist orbits. And it is brought into cleanly focused life by the show's director, David Rakoff, and its four-member ensemble -- Ms. Sedaris, Paul Dinello, Mitch Rouse and Becky Thyre -- who portray about 40 different characters with ingenious cartoonish shorthand.

The plot follows the roller-coaster career of Brittany Feeny (Ms. Thyre), the boating-accident victim who was, says a surgeon who sews her face back together, "a step-daughter to everyone." After being discovered by Hollywood agents ("She really had something . . . no face or chin, but something," reports one of them) in a Hospital Follies production, Brittany is given her own television show, also entitled "Stitches."

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In a briskly staged theatrical equivalent of cinematic montage, people throughout the country, from blue-collar workers to fashion models, are shown sporting slashed faces in emulation of their new idol. When Brittany loses her right arm to an electric fan on the set of her show, her adoring fans lop off their right arms, creating serious problems for truck drivers, pool players and diners on buffet lines. Brittany's subsequent fall from grace is inevitable.

The play's satiric scythe swings wide, with targets that include the studiedly jaded Manhattan art scene, Method acting, Hollywood power players, drug abuse, mass murderers and Brittany's classically dysfunctional hick family. "At least your mother had the decency to die right there in the car with me," Brittany's father tells her in the hospital. In fact, the entire country is portrayed as dysfunctional, a grotesque, slightly-too-familiar chain of exploiters and addicted consumers.

Still, the company has a well-tuned ear for the fatuity of contemporary jargon, whether it comes from high or low culture. And it employs bargain-basement production values with uncanny efficiency, creating -- against Hugh Hamrick's set of two-dimensional cutouts and silhouette framing scrims -- the distorting sense of a comic-strip universe.

Ultimately, even at an hour and 20 minutes, "Stitches" sags, like a blackout sketch waiting for an overdue blackout. By the play's last third, its comic energy has diffused into excessive repetition (one could particularly do without quite so many rectal jokes), and its film noir conclusion feels sadly deflated.

Nonetheless, it's impossible to dismiss a comedy that bends all forms of cultural cliches with such demented verve. Even that stalest source of classic camp, the Hollywood soap opera, is recycled with vivid style here. "You want a pool?" Brittany screams at her director. "O.K., Karl, get a shovel and dig. But fill it with your own tears, because you're not getting any more of mine." Stitches By Amy Sedaris and David Sedaris; directed by David Rakoff; set by Hugh Hamrick; lighting by Howard Thies; stage manager, Thaddeus Phillips. Presented by La MaMa E.T.C., Ellen Stewart, founder and artistic director. At 74A East Fourth Street, Manhattan. WITH: Paul Dinello, Amy Sedaris, Mitch Rouse and Becky Thyre.

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A version of this review appears in print on January 11, 1994, on Page C00015 of the National edition with the headline: Review/Theater: Stitches; Of Stardom and a Tyranny of Images. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe